Dr. Jess Ingrassellino
Life
I have spent my life with the violin: first learning the traditions surrounding it, then teaching them, and now examining them, taking them apart, pulling at their edges. Increasingly, I find myself less interested in preserving what a violinist is supposed to be than in discovering what a violinist can become within a rapidly changing culture.
We are entering a moment when music can be generated, reproduced, manipulated, distributed, and consumed with every possible combination of human and technology, from completely human, to completely artificial. AI programs can produce songs in seconds. Algorithms determine much of what we hear on streaming audio and social media. Effects pedals, synthesizers, and digital plugins can change, correct, and shape every aspect of an analog sound into something unrecognizable. My violin can become a thunderstorm.
Instrumentation
The electric violin is particularly suited to the instability and uncertainty of this particular moment. From its acoustic beginnings, the electric violin retains the physical intimacy of bow, string, resonance, gesture, and touch. With the addition of a pickup, solid body, and effects, the signal can be duplicated, distorted, looped, fragmented, processed, and transformed beyond recognition.
My work with pedals, signal routing, amplification, looping, extended techniques, and electric instruments is itself part of the inquiry into what it means to be a musician, an artist, a human. Every device simultaneously imposes constraints while creating possibilities. I build systems and then improvise inside them, listening and responding as the work unfolds.
This experimentation also shapes my work as an educator. For centuries, string education has been extraordinarily successful at transmitting existing knowledge from one generation to another. But musicians now inhabit a culture in which instruments, technologies, creative economies, and even the definition of musical authorship are changing rapidly. I believe musicians must learn not only how to reproduce established practices, but how to investigate systems they have never encountered before.
Work
Both MasquedViol.in and The Human Music Machine use electric violin, electronics, effects, improvisation, artificial intelligence, audience participation, and theatrical performance to explore the increasingly unstable boundary between human creativity and technological inter|ference/vention.
The violin, a centuries-old acoustic technology, becomes an interface plugged into a network of contemporary digital systems, activated by a physical human making artistic decisions in real time.
MasquedViol.in approaches these questions through character, imagery, and speculative worlds. Masks and constructed personas allow me to exaggerate different relationships between people and technological systems: participation, resistance, dependence, survival, labor, identity, and control. The masked performer can be anyone or anything: musician, machine operator, test subject, worker, survivor, or something that no longer fits comfortably into any of those categories.
The Human Music Machine makes this relationship explicit. Audiences can participate in generating musical material through digital systems, including AI, while I respond to that material live. Digital sound, human emotion, and audience interaction becomes source material rather than a finished product. I can interrupt it, misunderstand it, contradict it, imitate it, distort it, or find something inside it that neither the audience, the machine, nor I could have predicted beforehand. The audience invents, the machine produces. The artist listens and responds with sound. The audience reacts to the response. A feedback loop develops between people, algorithms, instruments, and technologies. The resulting performances investigate what happens to creativity when authorship becomes distributed across the artists, the audience, and the artifice.
Who made the music?
Who is performing whom?
What does it mean to listen when we no longer know who owns what part of the performance?
Through Electric Violin Labs, I bring this philosophy into practice, creating educational experiences where string players can experiment with electric instruments, effects, improvisation, technology, and new approaches to musicianship.
Music gives us an unusually powerful place to examine that transition because music is both technological and deeply embodied. We build instruments and systems to extend ourselves, but somewhere inside those systems there is still a person listening, choosing, responding, and trying to communicate with another person. The future musician will be a performer, improviser, technologist, composer, collaborator, producer, researcher, storyteller, and critical listener, often simultaneously.
I am interested in inhabiting spaces where those identities collide.